In The Cold Light Of Dawn

People who have never suffered the whispers, the cruelty, the pain, they will never know what those years were like for me. They’d say they understood, but really they’d have no clue. I was the most hated girl in school, and I didn’t even know why. I used to be sort of popular, in the first year, the beginning, but as the years went by my friends became foes, until eventually people just stayed away from me. Everyday I’d wake up, bathing in grey beams of light, never felling the warmth. I went to school., they’d whisper. If I tripped, they’d laugh. When I sat down, the chair next to me was the last to be filled. In the half a decade I was there, I had four real friends. The first was “Summer”, that wasn’t her real name but she’d be mad if I told you. The second was “Mitchell” he was in the year above me , and like me didn’t have many friends in his time at Oakfield. I meet my third friend through him, another outsider, a misfit, but she was hated for different reasons than us. She was a Pakistani Muslim, living in a city which had been bombed the year before she moved by people claiming to be of her religion. My forth friend wasn’t exactly like me and “Afra”, she was one of those kids who was somewhere in the middle, half popular, half regular. Afra said she's popular now, in her high school, but I wouldn't know because haven't seen her in two and a half years. By final year I thought I was getting my social life back together. I had two friends in my year. I thought they’d finished, that they left me alone. This was before I learned they had just been doing it all behind my back. I don’t know which realisation was the most crusting. That they In the end I wished there was some cruel under, a bottomless pit through the layers of clay and concrete which I could jump down, never to be seen again. But of course there wasn’t, so had to just grit my teeth, deal with it. That was two and half years ago, even though it’s over now, it still hurts and I think it always will. I don’t get bullied anymore, but I was so scared that it would continue in high school that I asked Afra to call me my middle name so the others couldn’t spread rumours about me, which they didn’t. I have friends now, that I care about and care about me in return which is great. Now you know my story, know you know how important it is that we stop bulling. Thank you for reading.

Subscribe

Get Teen Ink’s 48-page monthly print edition. Written by teens since 1989.